Provoke: Complete Reprint of 3 Volumes

Provoke reproduces, in full, the three issues of the short-lived dojin-shi (self-published magazine) that reshaped postwar Japanese photography.

Founded in November 1968 by critic Koji Taki and photographer Takuma Nakahira, with poet Takahiko Okada and photographer Yutaka Takanashi as founding members, Provoke carried the subtitle "Provocative Materials for Thought." Daido Moriyama joined for the second and third issues. Each number combined grainy, blurred, out-of-focus photographs — mocked at the time as are-bure-boke — with essays and poems, and the group dissolved after a fourth publication, First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty, that surveyed the three issues together. This edition, published by Nitesha, restores the original image sizes and all original texts, including Okada's essays omitted from an earlier facsimile box set, and adds a booklet of complete English and Chinese translations.

Original copies of Provoke are almost never seen outside archives and museum collections, and its rough, anti-descriptive style went on to influence generations of Japanese photographers, Moriyama chief among them. This reprint is the fullest facsimile edition of the magazine's short run currently available.